Show Your Work! Quotes

“Raw enthusiasm is contagious.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.” —Andy Baio”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Brancusi practiced what I call The Vampire Test. It’s a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people—you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Do you look at art? What do you collect? What’s inside your scrapbook? What do you pin to the corkboard above your desk? What do you stick on your refrigerator? Who’s done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who do you follow online? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field?”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” —Kenneth Goldsmith”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“What are you working on?” Stick to that question and you’ll be good. Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“I’m not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I’m going to make them happen, and if people think I’m an idiot I don’t care.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.” —Steve Jobs If”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Don’t share things you can’t properly credit. Find the right credit, or don’t share.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“There are a lot of destructive myths about creativity, but one of the most dangerous is the “lone genius” myth.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it. Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know. Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.” —John le Carré”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.” —Errol Morris”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90 percent of everything is crap. The same is true of our own work. The trouble is, we don’t always know what’s good and what sucks.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered